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Government/Media Overreaction to COVID-19 Has Caused More Deaths Than the Virus Itself
Increased Suicide, Murder-Suicide, Domestic Violence and Overdoses Caused by Pandemic Psyop Run By Psychopolitical Operators With a Goal to Re-engineer Society with Face Masks, Social Distancing and Fear-based Propaganda
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal
October 7, 2020
There have been more deaths from suicide, murder-suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism and reduced access to healthcare for cancer, heart disease and other chronic health issues than there have been directly attributed to COVID-19. This is a result of irresponsible mainstream media reporting and highly restrictive government health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In their quest to first “slow the spread” of COVID-19, which quickly turned into an unrealistic “stopping the spread” when it was found hospitals weren’t going to be as overwhelmed as computer models predicted, governments both here in Maine and around the world have initiated safety measures that are now being shown to have caused more deaths and reduced health and well-being than the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Fixated on “positive case numbers” and alleged deaths, governments were moved by hype and hyperbole from the left-wing corporate news media into enacting highly restrictive mandates with little to no forethought about the collateral damage they will cause in society via deaths of despair. Relying on error-filled computer models and guided by epidemiologists in their own respective health departments, with no consideration for the destructiveness of their mandates on the psychological health of the citizens they represent, government leaders hysterically issued irrational mandates to “stop the spread” of COVID-19 at all costs - even if those costs would be greater than the toll caused by the virus.
Save those that didn’t lock down, most governments have been treating their citizens as impersonal chattel objects and seemed to mold and fashion their mandates as if they were simply inputting data to a society of robots without any consideration to the fact that humans are living, breathing, social, emotional beings and that the purpose of life isn’t merely to survive, but to live and enjoy life while we’re here.
We are now finding out that the cost to “protect” society from COVID-19 has actually cost more lives - due to the collateral damage caused by the reckless, irresponsible government lockdown and health mandates - than the virus has taken, by any of the alleged counts. Those collateral deaths go unreported by the corporate media as their attention continues to be fixated incessantly on COVID-19 positive case numbers - which are irrelevant in the big scheme of things - and a macabre infatuation with the associated deaths.
Oddly, police departments across the country have found themselves placed on the front line of a new phenomenon spawned by the COVID hysteria - they are now being called upon to conduct well-being checks on a much younger population than they do historically.
Well-being checks are usually conducted by police as part of a community relations program where a distant relative may call and request an officer check in on their elderly family member. Here, in Fort Fairfield, the Fort Fairfield Police Department over the years has conducted these types of well-being checks at a rate of a dozen or so per year for elderly people usually above 70 years of age. This year, however, FFPD is being called upon to conduct well-being checks on a half dozen or so people per week in the 20 to 50 years of age demographic. FFPD Chief, Shawn Newell said the increase in well-being checks for this age group at this point in time is due to the extraordinary psychological and economic strain being placed on society by COVID-19.
Similar issues are confronting police departments across the country as people struggle with maintaining their social structure and a place to live, while battling against egregious health isolation mandates by governments who, relying on errant computer models from early Spring, are increasingly out of touch with the reality of COVID-19 which the data now shows is only a little worse than the seasonal flu.
Maine’s psychological issues come from both the exaggerated, hyperbolic and irresponsible propagandizing on COVID-19 by the establishment media and the incessant and heavy handed health orders from a governor who doesn't want a legacy of COVID-19 deaths hanging over her head during the next election. But, apparently, a legacy of increased suicides and drug overdoses is okay. A recent study by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center revealed as many as 260 deaths from drug overdoses have occurred in Maine during the first six months of the year - twice as many as the same time last year. This is also double the amount of people who have allegedly died from COVID-19 in Maine during the same time period this year.
The establishment left-wing media seems to be ignoring increasing criticism of their COVID narrative, thus placing their listeners and viewers in an artificial bubble, shielded from all opposing points of view. But, that hasn't stopped scientists and doctors from speaking out about the damages government overreaction is causing.
In an open letter signed by hundreds of medical doctors to the Belgian government and media (Belgian letter) it was noted, “‘A cure must not be worse than the problem’ is a thesis that is more relevant than ever in the current situation. We note, however, that the collateral damage now being caused to the population will have a greater impact in the short and long term on all sections of the population than the number of people now being safeguarded from corona. Social isolation and economic damage led to an increase in depression, anxiety, suicides, intra-family violence and child abuse. Studies have shown that the more social and emotional commitments people have, the more resistant they are to viruses. It is much more likely that isolation and quarantine have fatal consequences.”
Lockdowns Cost more Lost Years of Life Than COVID-19 Did.
An article written by Scott Atlas, John Birge, Ralphy Keeney and Alexander Lipton in The Hill states, “Statistically every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death.”
“When you look at this kind of number, someone might say where'd you get that? These are numbers that are pretty established in the economics literatures and actuarial tables and in a variety of other publications,” explained Dr. Scott Atlas, in an interview with The Hoover Institution. “We did not do any model or complex hypothetical projection. We looked at established retrospective data that has been done that is empirical that correlates loss of economic productivity, unemployment, and similarly the health care losses that we went through.”
“Unemployment itself leads to worsening health and loss of lives and life years, which is exactly the way economists really classify things. It's the life years - the decreased life expectancy, per se. For example, somebody who dies at the age of 20 has lost more - according to the economists' calculations - than someone who dies at the age of 90.”
As of the end of May, Dr. Atlas used the actuarial tables to estimate the national lockdown was responsible for around 700,000 lost years of life (not individual deaths) every month, or about 1.5 million total lost years of life thus far two months into the lockdowns, nearly double the lost years of life caused by COVID-19 at that time. “Those are the conservative numbers because in that calculation, we only included the lost years of life from unemployment, in terms of the economic side, and the lives lost from the specific health care issues that were not getting done.”
Deaths from Set Aside Health Care Issues
Cancer diagnoses are down 75% and heart disease diagnoses are down 70% during to the COVID lockdowns of the healthcare industry. Those people, going undiagnosed, will soon find their health seriously compromised because of the government's heavy handed and reckless lockdown strategy. We may well find the death toll from missed diagnoses in the end is even greater than those who died from COVID.
“This is one of the really horrifying but underemphasized truths of the costs of the lockdown,” said Dr. Atlas as he pointed out 650,000 Americans have cancer and undergo chemotherapy right now. “Half of them stopped getting their chemotherapy. That actually happened in the U.S. during the so-called lockdown. There are two reasons. One is, in the beginning the hospitals, because of anticipated overcrowding decided we're going to stop 'non-essential' procedures. What that meant is not what a layman would understand at a glance. The reality is non-essential procedures meant everything that was not emergent. So that means literally thousands of biopsies per week of potential cancers were not done. Also, two thirds to three fourths of cancer screenings were not done. The second part is the fear. It turns out even emergency care was not getting done. Forty percent of people who had an acute stroke did not call the ambulance out of fear. Same thing with heart attacks. Forty to fifty percent of people with heart attacks did not call the ambulance.”
In an interview with Dr. Atlas, Phil Robinson noted; “It seems to me the way you make policy is doing a cost-benefit analysis; there are benefits to locking down; we save these COVID lives. But, there seemed to be no effort to assess the costs and here comes Scott Atlas saying the costs outweigh the benefits. This article in The Hill was the first time I had seen anyone trying to measure the costs of the lockdown anywhere. Why weren't they measuring the costs from the get-go?”
“This is one of the several egregious failures of the policy implementation,” explained Dr. Atlas. “Basically what we would sanely do is consider the impact of what we're doing as well as the impact of what we're trying to prevent. Instead, they did two things. They - the policy makers in general - put in a lockdown. They did not calculate at all the costs of the harms or consequence of the lockdown. They did a 'stop COVID-19 at all costs' and they used hypothetical projection models that were so egregiously wrong, far, far off - yet they keep citing those models. So the extension of the lockdown is the problem. I think we can all understand why the initial lockdown was done. Once the fatality rate projections are actually data instead of projections, when we see what's going on, when we know who to protect, we understand that the really disastrous consequences of what the continuation of the initial lockdown is doing.”
Suicides, Drug Overdose and other Deaths of Despair
In a study released in May by Well Being Trust and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care suggested as many as 75,000 additional deaths from alcohol, drug overdose and suicide can be expected during the media’s and government's artificially created COVID scare.
Suicides in Maine are already up this year, with several cases reported to this writer about people who killed themselves as a direct result of the economic hardships imposed on them or their business during Maine’s lockdown in April. This trend is echoed across the U.S. and around the world as governments in some places continue to impose harsh lockdowns now over six months into the pandemic and despite all the new data about the virus that shows it’s not as deadly as it was projected to be.
“Right now, many people are worried about job loss. Thankfully, the vast majority of people facing this challenge will not think about suicide,” said Dr. Karen Schwartz, Associate Prof. of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s having the deadly mixture of vulnerability, from having a psychiatric illness, combined with the major stress that greatly increases the risk of suicide.”
Dr. Schwartz says the intense pressure governments have placed on their citizens can also create a psychiatric illness in people who otherwise had no issues. “We’re currently in a situation where two of the major risk factors - having a psychiatric illness and being in the midst of terrible stress - are both much too common. Suicide was a major health care crisis before the onset of COVID-19. Last year 48,000 committed suicide. What we’re facing now is a growing number of people who are having symptoms of depression, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Domestic Violence intensifying.”
She said that recently, the National Center for Health Statistics in the Census Bureau did a poll survey. They surveyed 120,000 adults in the U.S. in mid-May to get a snapshot of the rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms currently in this country. “The results are very concerning. Approximately one third of adults - or 34% - surveyed reported having anxiety or depressive symptoms. These numbers represent a dramatic increase from a study done one year ago which has those numbers at eleven percent. While it’s not surprising, it’s very important to me as a psychiatrist that we’ve tripled the number of people who are reporting anxiety or depressive symptoms.”
Domestic Violence Also Increased
Doctors across the country also report a marked rise in domestic violence assault - and even homicide/suicide as one partner kills the other first, then kills themselves.
Dr. Jackie Campbell, Professor of Nursing at Johns Hopkins University explained some of the issues facing couples during the lockdown of society. “I’m very lucky, I’m very privileged, I have a lovely place where I can shelter in place. But many families do not. They’re in crowded spaces, they can’t get away from each other. So, it would make sense theoretically, especially if there was prior domestic violence, that that domestic violence would get worse. It’s not at all clear that domestic violence would start for the first time in a COVID lockdown situation. A partner who has not been violent before is probably not going to suddenly become violent. However, we do worry a lot about couples where there has been low-level violence and where that isolation, increased stress from losing a job and/or worrying about people getting COVID, or having a family member that has COVID - it’s stressor on top of stressor. If that person has been highly traumatized before, has witnessed domestic violence, has been abused as a child, then that situation might be very triggering for them.”
It seems none of this was considered by governments as they arbitrarily locked down their entire society on a whim to “protect” them from a virus.
Society-Wide Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
A less obvious byproduct of the COVID lockdowns is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) being caused by the incessant media presentation of positive case and death numbers 24 hours a day with no context or background to the data, as they attempt to manipulate society with fear and intimidation.
PTSD is a situation where anxiety, avoidance, major depression and hyper arousal and reactivity, being caused from an extremely stressful situation, converge into the psyche of the person creating a great deal of debilitating stress and anxiety.
Many combat soldiers suffer from PTSD as do prisoners of war who suffered under torture.
Interestingly, Amnesty International has published a guidebook describing torture and its effects on the human psyche. In reading this guide book, it can be shown that the mainstream news media and governments who locked down are imposing a form of psychological torture on the population similar to that imposed on prisoners of war, whether they realize they’re doing it, or not.
According to the aforementioned Belgian letter, “The relentless bombardment [by the establishment media] with figures, that were unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without interpreting those figures, without comparing them to flu deaths in other years, without comparing them to deaths from other causes, has induced a real psychosis of fear in the population. This is not information, this is manipulation.”